Somewhere in France: A Novel of the Great War (16 page)

Chapter 30

“B
ugger of a day.” Tom Mitchell had never been one to mince his words.

“Aye.” Robbie was too tired to talk. Too tired to think, to eat, to do anything but sleep.

“Coming to breakfast?”

“What time is it?”

“Half-past five.”

“No, thanks. I’d rather get a few hours of sleep.”

“I’ll be along in a bit. Will try not to wake you.” Tom shuffled off in the direction of the mess tent, his head bent against the driving rain.

Robbie was soaked through by the time he reached their tent. He unbuckled his boots and gaiters, shrugged out of his jacket, shirt, trousers, and socks, and fell onto his cot, wearing only his singlet and undershorts. The blankets were damp and chill, and it was an age before he was able to stop shivering.

No sooner had he fallen asleep, it seemed, than he was being shaken awake.

“Captain Fraser, sir!”

“Um, yes?” he mumbled, wishing whoever it was would just go away and leave him in peace.

“We’ve another load of wounded in, sir, and the OC says you’re needed.”

Robbie sat up, shook the cobwebs from his head, and dressed rapidly. “How many?” he asked.

“I dunno, sir. Lots. Reception marquee’s full already, and more’re on the way.”

“Christ Almighty. Just when we’d cleared out the last lot.”

He followed the orderly through the night, squinting against the faint light of the kerosene lantern lighting their way, and braced himself for the hours to come. There was nothing about it that ought to faze or unsettle him in the slightest, for he’d long ago lost count of the number of times he’d been roused from bed and harried into an operating theater.

So why, this morning, did he feel as if he were riding a tumbrel on the way to the guillotine? Why was he assailed by a feeling of dread that began in his toes, wound snakelike through his guts, and perched as heavy and ponderous as a gargoyle over his heart?

The orderly hadn’t exaggerated. The tent was bursting at the seams: scores of men on stretchers lined the floor, with half as many again sitting on the benches that stretched along the perimeter. Even with seven surgeons operating at full tilt, it would take an entire day, or more, to clear the marquee.

He was the first of the doctors to arrive, so set to work at triaging the stretcher cases. First up was a private, his skin pale and clammy to the touch, his respiration shallow, his pulse rapid and thready. Robbie bent to read the label that had been affixed to the soldier’s jacket: single rifle wound, right lower abdomen, no apparent exit wound.

It was hopeless. Back in England, with all the amenities of a modern operating theater at his disposal, he could easily save this man. But here? It might be possible, assuming he could find a handful of walking wounded who were strong enough to donate blood, assuming the bullet hadn’t nicked the man’s spine, assuming he didn’t die of shock before they got him into surgery.

“Where to?” asked Private Dixon, who was waiting for his orders.

“Resuss tent.” He’d have ordered some morphine for the man, if there were any to spare, but they’d only enough at present to support the postoperative cases. One of the nurses would make sure he was warm, and she might even be free to hold his hand when death crept close. As long as she wasn’t holding the hand of some other poor bugger at the time.

Next in line was a captain, his right arm shattered by a shell fragment. Straightforward amputation. “Pre-op,” he instructed Dixon.

Resuss. Resuss. Pre-op. Resuss. Pre-op. And then a sergeant, young for his rank, no more than nineteen or twenty.

“Hello, Sergeant. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

He only shook his head, his eyes wide with terror, and pointed to the label attached to his jacket.
Simple fracture left humerus, superficial wounds to chest and abdomen, nervous shock.

“Can you tell me your name, Sergeant?” No response. The soldier’s eyes rolled upward, as if to heaven, and tears began to trickle down his face.

Robbie set his hand on the man’s right shoulder, steadily and gently, and tried to make eye contact. “My name is Captain Fraser. Listen to me for a moment. You’re away from it now. Do you hear me? You are away from it. Can you nod if you understand?”

The man nodded once, his eyes shut against the shaming tears.

“I’m going to see to it that you get a good long rest. That I promise you.” Robbie turned to Dixon. “Send him on to resuss. I’ll be along later to set his arm.”

He’d discuss things with the OC later, make sure the sergeant was sent to the closest neurasthenia center, and pray he found a sympathetic ear.

On to the next man, and no need to read the label this time. His head was bandaged, the cloth soaked through with blood, there were thick dressings on his chest and lower abdomen, and his left thigh was in a Thomas splint. Robbie took a moment to peer under the dressings, and what he saw only confirmed his initial instinct. The soldier was already, mercifully, unconscious, his pulse barely discernible.

“Resuss.”

On and on he progressed, up and down the rows, the wounded men becoming a blur of blood and mangled viscera and shattered bone. Tom had joined him; the other surgeons were already hard at work in the wooden hut that served as their theater.

From time to time he allowed himself to straighten, look ahead, wonder how long it would take to finish triage and move on to surgery. They were making headway, a little, and he decided when he came to the end of his present row of stretchers, he would take five minutes to visit the latrine and gulp down a mug of tea.

Resuss, pre-op, resuss, morgue—the man had died en route—resuss, resuss, pre-op, pre-op, pre-op.

He stood up fully; for the last hour he’d been crouching and shuffling, crablike, from stretcher to stretcher. His head spun and he had to bend forward, rest his forearms on his knees, and take a deep breath to right himself.

He stood tall, rubbed the sweat and grime from his eyes, and turned to look back at how far he’d come.

He was alone.

The marquee was empty, with not a stretcher left, not a single soldier sitting on its benches. No nurses, no orderlies, no Tom. Empty.

He swung round, dizzy again, unable to believe what he saw. Everyone was gone. Even the bloodstains had been scrubbed from the rough deal floors.

Silence descended on the marquee, though it was never quiet in camp. Even the guns were silent. All he heard was the thundering drumroll of his own heart.

He blinked, scrubbed at his eyes, tried to will the fantasy away. He had to settle himself, rid his mind of this bizarre vision, else risk being sent to the neurasthenia center with the young sergeant.

What was that sound? Someone was breathing, was struggling to breathe. He wheeled about and spied a stretcher, alone, abandoned at the far side of the marquee. Its occupant had been covered head to toe with a khaki blanket.

He stepped forward, surprised he hadn’t noticed the stretcher before. Only then did he see the faint movements beneath the blanket. The soldier was alive, after all.

It wasn’t the first time he’d known such a thing to take place; mistakes happened during a crush like this. He tried to move closer, but the floor was shifting and tilting beneath his feet, as unsteady as a ship in a gale, and after only a few steps he pitched forward on his knees and began to crawl.

He reached the stretcher, pulled back the blanket, and discovered that no soldier lay hidden beneath.

It was Lilly, his Lilly, and her wounds were the stuff of nightmares. Three huge field dressings, sodden and black with blood, covered her chest and abdomen, and as he scrabbled closer he saw that her hair, loose about her shoulders, was also wet with it.

He pulled back the dressings, his hands gone clumsy with terror, and saw the unmistakable evidence of bayonet wounds, deep and jagged and desecrating.

“Lilly, oh, Lilly,” he howled, knowing he could do nothing for her.

And she knew it, too. Her eyes were wild with pain and fear and the horror of what she had seen and felt at the hands of her enemies. She knew he couldn’t save her.

“Help me!” he screamed. “Will no one come and help me?”

But the orderlies were gone, Tom was gone, Matron was gone, and it was left to him to lift her, his hands slippery with blood, her body so terribly light in his arms.

“Don’t leave me, Lilly,” he begged, already broken, but the life was fading from her eyes, her face relaxing into the calm certainty of death, and he was falling, a deadweight through soundless skies, until he woke in a sweaty, gasping heap on his cot.

I
T HAD BEEN
the same dream for weeks now. A dream so vivid, so true, that the agony of it broke him anew each night.

It was still pitch-black outside, too dark in the tent to make out the time on his wristwatch. Less than an hour, probably, since he had fallen into bed. He’d been exhausted then, deliberately so, and had hoped the nightmare would pass him by.

So much for hope.

He sat up. Rummaged in his locker for clean clothes. Struggled into them. Laced up his boots, buckled on his gaiters, stood up. Shut his mind against the memory of the nightmare.

And went back to work.

Chapter 31

A
s days went, it hadn’t been a bad one. The weather had been fine, the sort of bright, clear day that made it difficult to believe that October would soon give way to November. Casualties had been light, so much so that Lilly and Constance had taken a long break at dinner, returning to the ADS at midafternoon to collect what Sergeant Barnes liked to call “me waifs and strays.”

The three men in the back of the ambulance were in good spirits; Blighty wounds tended to have that kind of effect. Who wouldn’t feel cheerful at the prospect of one or two weeks of bed rest in a base hospital?

“Give us a song, will yeh?”

The appeals from the back of the ambulance brought Lilly sharply back to earth. She looked to Constance, who was at the wheel. “Shall we give them some Gilbert and Sullivan?” Lilly suggested.

“We
could,
but I think they’d rather hear that song all the American boys are singing. How does it go?”

“The lyrics are ridiculous.”

“Stop complaining and sing.

“Somewhere in France is the lily,

Close by the English rose;

A thistle so keen, and a shamrock green,

And each loyal flower that grows.

Somewhere in France is a sweetheart—”

At that moment they rounded the crest of the hill. Plumes of black smoke were billowing from the direction of the CCS. It was no ordinary fire that burned, for the smoke was coming from at least three locations. Shell fire, then. As Robbie had told her would happen, sooner or later.

Constance parked the ambulance at the edge of the camp and ran around to the rear of the vehicle. She was back at Lilly’s side a moment later. “I told them the camp has been hit, and asked them to stay put. As soon as we know more, we’ll come and fetch them.”

Arm in arm, they walked in the direction of the reception marquee—or, rather, the remains of the marquee. It had collapsed into a heap of canvas, rope, and jagged, still-smoldering timbers.

“But we were here only an hour ago,” Lilly said. Panic surged within her, for what if Robbie had been hurt? Where was he?

“The shells fell right after you left.”

The women turned to see Private Gillespie, his hands roughly bandaged, his face blackened by soot and blood.

“Was anyone in the marquee?” Lilly asked.

“The last load of wounded from this morning,” he confirmed. “Most of the orderlies. Two nurses. None of the doctors.” At that, he looked Lilly straight in the eye.

“What happened to them?” Constance asked.

“No one was killed, thank God. Shell fell just outside the marquee. Some were badly hurt, though.”

“And what of the rest of the camp?” Lilly asked. “Is there any other damage?”

“My garage is gone. A corner of the ward tent collapsed when another shell fell just outside it. And there’s one dud. See over there, on the far side of the marquee tent? Stay well clear, no matter what. We’re waiting for the AOC to defuse it. Assuming they show up, that is.”

“We’ve wounded men in the ambulance,” Lilly said. “What shall we do with them?”

“Mess tent. Matron’s set up in there. Do you need any help?”

Lilly shook her head. “No; you get back to what you were doing. Are you . . . how are you?”

He smiled, briefly, the white of his teeth flashing against the soot ingrained in his skin. “I’ll survive. Was just outside the ward tent when the shell hit. Burst my eardrums, I think, and knocked me over, but I’ll be fine.”

“Let us know if we can—”

“Matron needs you now. You go to her.”

I
T WAS HARD
work, transferring the Tommies from the ambulance to the mess tent. One man was able to walk; the other two, with the help of crutches, and steadying arms, were able to stagger to the relative safety of the makeshift ward.

A jumble of tables flanked its entrance, evidence of the haste in which the tent had been prepared for its new role. Inside, however, all was calm efficiency.

The benches normally used for seating during meals were pushed up against the sides of the tent; they held the walking wounded. Row upon row of stretchers filled the space that remained. Some of the wounded men looked to have been evacuated from the ward tent, while the rest were new arrivals.

Matron spotted the women immediately. Dispensing with any preamble, she handed Lilly and Constance a pair of scissors each and directed them to a line of stretchers.

“These men are waiting to go into surgery. I need you to remove their clothing. All of it off, every bit,” she instructed. “This is no time to be missish. There are sheets and blankets to cover them on the table over there. Keep your hands clean.”

With that, Lilly and Constance set to work. In minutes their hands were aching from the effort of propelling the scissors through thick woolen material so soaked with sweat, mud, and blood that it might as well have been chain mail.

While Lilly cut along the outer seam of the wounded man’s left jacket sleeve, Constance cut along the right. At last they reached his shoulder; what now?

“Let’s cut to the collar,” Lilly suggested. “We can drag it out from under him after that.”

“What about his webbing? Should we try and unfasten all of these straps?”

“No. Cut through everything.”

Working together, they managed to pull away the remnants of the jacket. Their charge seemed only vaguely aware of what they were doing, although at one point he opened his eyes, looked at Constance, and smiled. Then he appeared to fall unconscious again.

“Quick, now,” Lilly urged. They repeated the exercise for his shirt and singlet, then turned their attention to his trousers. The soldier had been wounded badly in the right thigh; his trouser leg, on that side, had been cut away and replaced by a large field dressing, now sodden with blood.

Lilly began at his waistband, cutting steadily southward until she reached the top band of his puttees, still carefully tucked in place. It would be too difficult to unwind them; best to keep cutting. She snipped through his bootlaces, too, before gently pulling off his left boot.

She looked up to see that Constance had paused, her scissors hovering over the man’s undershorts. “Lilly . . . I don’t know if I can—”

“You heard what Matron said. Just concentrate on cutting through the material. I’ll cover him up so you don’t have to look at anything.”

“Sorry to be so, ah . . . it’s just that I’ve never seen . . .”

“Nor have I,” Lilly reassured her. “But this hardly counts. Hurry up, now; look how many more we have to do.”